Moose Dreams

It is shortly before 8 p.m. on a Friday in May. Kirk heads toward his cramped Dupont Circle apartment, riding shotgun in Brad Mendelsohn's car. Eric Wargo, his 39-year-old screenwriter, sits in the back and tries to channel Kirk's emotion. "This is good. Let's use that anger . . . to propel this thing."

"Can you even sculpt glass?" Kirk frets. "I don't think it's possible. Don't you have to blow glass?"

Eric has a eureka moment. "What if gay doesn't mean gay?" he asks. "What if gay glass means the type of glass, like gay glass is this new space age material that doesn't chip?"

Kirk's eyes light up. "I love it," he says.

Three city blocks later, the car halts in front of a store. Kirk and Eric emerge carrying four gallons of iced tea, fully caffeinated. Kirk knows it's going to be a long night.

Kirk didn't set out to be a filmmaker. He grew up in a suburb of Akron, Ohio. His mother was a part-time dental hygienist; his father worked for the phone company and later became the town's mayor. As a kid, Kirk gravitated to jazz and the art of improvisation, collecting stacks of LPs that he culled from discount bins at local record shops. He organized big jazz bands -- 10 pieces or more -- that rehearsed in his parents' basement.

But when he went off to Miami University of Ohio, he settled on a more pragmatic course, deciding to become a doctor. "Organic chemistry put an end to that," he says. "I got a D in the class." So he majored in physics, with the aim of heading to graduate school to become a weather researcher. But he decided the work would be too tedious.

Instead, he became a driving instructor. "It was the worst job of all time," he says. "I trained for five weeks without any pay. And I had to read a book called Happiness Is a Driver's License. "

After a short, equally unsatisfying stint making in-home sales pitches for $829 Bose clock radios, Kirk moved to Washington in 1988. He eventually got a job as an apprentice film editor for a small production company. He was broke and earning only $60 a day, but the real compensation, he says, was the thrill of being creative.

Since coming to Washington, Kirk has worked in supporting roles on some significant film projects, including a couple of Academy Award-nominated short documentaries, one of which won an Oscar, and as the production manager for a pair of PBS-funded "Frontline" documentaries. But none was his own. "I really like being on the set of someone I admire," he says. "But there has to be a point or a moment when you're going to step out of the shadow and say, I'm going to take the lead." The 48 Hour Film Project was his chance to be a director for the first time.

The annual filmmaking frenzy is the brainchild of Mark Ruppert, a filmmaker who'd read about a 24-hour play competition where contestants zipped from page to stage in one day. "I thought it would be fantastic to try it with video, although I knew we would need more time," says Ruppert. When he and his friend Liz Langston, a local film producer, organized the first contest, "we weren't even sure if it was possible to make a film in 48 hours, or if those films would be in any way watchable."

Some of those initial 12 films were actually pretty good. After the first screening in 2001, word of the 48 Hour Film Project rippled through Washington's film community, which is home to giants such as National Geographic and Discovery Communications, but also speckled with freelancers and boutique production houses that pump out everything from political ads to sewage industry training videos.